Swan Song

by Robert R. McCammon

  Teddybear Warner crawled away to get a fire built, and Roland followed him like an automaton. They piled the pieces of the desk, the chairs and the clothes from the corpses into a corner and used some burning pieces of cable from the hallway to start the fire. Teddybear, moving slowly and in agony, piled on ceiling tiles and added some of the alcohol to the flames. At first there was just a lot of smoke, but then the red glow began to strengthen.

  Corporal Prados still sat against the opposite wall, watching them work. His face was damp with sweat, and he kept babbling feverishly, but Warner paid him no attention. Now the pieces of the desk and the chairs were charring, the bitter smoke rising up into the holes and cracks in the ceiling.

  Warner hobbled to the edge of the fire and picked up a leg of one of the broken chairs; the other end of it was burning brightly, and the wood had turned from black to ash-gray. He poked it back into the bonfire and turned toward Roland. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s get it done.”

  Though he ground his teeth with the pressure that wrenched his back, Warner grasped Roland’s hand and helped lower him into the pit. Roland stepped on the dead body. Warner kept the light directed at Macklin’s trapped arm and talked Roland through the application of the tourniquet to the colonel’s wrist. Roland had to lie in a contorted position on the corpse to reach the injured arm, and he saw that Macklin’s wrist had turned black. Macklin suddenly shifted and tried to look up, but he couldn’t lift his head. “Tighter,” Macklin managed to say. “Tie knots in the bastard!”

  It took Roland four tries to get it tight enough. Warner dropped the bottle of alcohol down, and Roland splashed the blackened wrist. Macklin took the bottle with his free hand and finally twisted his head up to look at Roland. “What’s your name?”

  “Roland Croninger, sir.”

  Macklin could tell it was a boy from the weight and the voice, but he couldn’t make out the face. Something glinted, and he angled his head to look at the meat cleaver the boy held. “Roland,” he said, “you and I are going to get to know each other real well in the next couple of minutes. Teddy! Where’s the fire?”

  Warner’s light vanished for a minute, and Roland was alone in the dark with the colonel. “Bad day,” Macklin said. “Haven’t seen any worse, have you?”

  “No, sir.” Roland’s voice shook.

  The light returned. Warner was holding the burning chair leg like a torch. “I’ve got it, Colonel! Roland, I’m going to drop this down to you. Ready?”

  Roland caught the torch and leaned over Colonel Macklin again. The colonel, his eyes hazy with pain, saw the boy’s face in the flickering light and thought he recognized him from somewhere. “Where are your parents, son?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ve lost them.”

  Macklin watched the burning end of the chair leg and prayed that it would be hot enough to do the job. “You’ll be okay,” he said. “I’ll make sure of that.” His gaze moved from the torch and fixed on the meat cleaver’s blade. The boy crouched awkwardly over him, straddling the corpse, and stared at Macklin’s wrist where it joined the rock wall. “Well,” Macklin said, “it’s time. Okay, Roland: let’s get it done before one of us turns chickenshit. I’m going to try to hang on as much as I can. You ready?”

  “He’s ready,” Teddybear Warner said from the lip of the pit.

  Macklin smiled grimly, and a bead of sweat ran down the bridge of his nose. “Make the first lick a hummer, Roland,” he urged.

  Roland gripped the torch in his left hand and raised his right, with the meat cleaver in it, back over his head. He knew exactly where he was going to strike—right where the blackened skin was swallowed up in the fissure. Do it! he told himself. Do it now! He heard Macklin draw a sharp breath. Roland’s hand clenched the cleaver, and it hung at the zenith over his head. Do it now! He felt his arm go as rigid as an iron rod. Do it now!

  And he sucked in his breath and brought the cleaver down with all of his strength on Colonel Macklin’s wrist.

  Bone crunched. Macklin jerked but made no sound. Roland thought the blade had gone all the way through, but he saw with renewed shock that it had only penetrated the man’s thick wrist to the depth of an inch.

  “Finish it!” Warner shouted.

  Roland pulled the cleaver out.

  Macklin’s eyes, ringed with purple, fluttered closed and then jerked open again. “Finish it,” he whispered.

  Roland lifted his arm and struck down again. Still the wrist wouldn’t part. Roland struck down a third time, and a fourth, harder and harder. He heard the one-eyed hunchback shouting at him to hurry, but Macklin remained silent. Roland pulled the cleaver free and struck a fifth time. There was a lot of blood now, but still the tendons hung together. Roland began to grind the cleaver back and forth; Macklin’s face had turned a pasty yellow-white, his lips as gray as graveyard dirt.

  It had to be finished before the blood started bursting out like a firehose. When that happened, Roland knew, the King would die. He lifted the cleaver over his head, his shoulder throbbing with the effort—and suddenly it was not a meat cleaver anymore; it was a holy axe, and he was Sir Roland of the Realm, summoned to free the trapped King from this suffocating dungeon. He was the only one in all the kingdom who could do it, and this moment was his. Righteous power pulsed within him, and as he brought the holy axe flashing down he heard himself shout in a hoarse, almost inhuman voice.

  The last of the bone cracked. Sinews parted under the power of the holy axe. And then the King was writhing, and a grotesque bleeding thing with a surface like a sponge was thrust up into Roland’s face. Blood sprayed over his cheeks and forehead, all but blinding him.

  “Burn it!” Warner yelled.

  Roland put the torch to the bleeding spongy thing; it jerked away from him, but Roland grabbed and held it while Macklin thrashed wildly. He pressed the torch to the wound where the colonel’s hand had been. Roland watched the stump burn with dreadful fascination, saw the wound blacken and pucker, heard the hiss of Macklin’s burning blood. Macklin’s body was fighting involuntarily, the colonel’s eyes rolled back in his head, but Roland hung on to the wounded arm. He smelled blood and burnt flesh, drew it deeply into his lungs like a soul-cleansing incense, and kept searing the wound, pressing fire to flesh. Finally Macklin stopped fighting, and from his mouth came a low, eerie moan, as if from the throat of a wounded beast.

  “Okay!” Warner called down. “That’s it!”

  Roland was hypnotized by the sight of the melting flesh. The torn sleeve of Macklin’s jacket was on fire, and smoke whirled around the walls of the pit.

  “That’s enough!” Warner shouted. The boy wouldn’t stop! “Roland! That’s enough, damn it!”

  This time the man’s voice jolted him back to reality. Roland released the colonel’s arm and saw that the stump had been burned black and shiny, as if coated with tar. The flames on Macklin’s jacket sleeve were gnawing themselves out. It’s over, Roland realized. All over. He beat the piece of wood against the pit’s wall until the fire was out, and then he dropped it.

  “I’m going to try to find some rope to get you out with!” Warner called. “You okay?”

  Roland didn’t feel like answering. Warner’s light moved away, and Roland was left in darkness. He could hear the colonel’s harsh breathing, and he crawled backward over the corpse that lay jammed between them until his back was against rock; then he drew his legs up and clutched the holy axe close to his body. A grin was fixed on his blood-flecked face, but his eyes were circles of shock.

  The colonel moaned and muttered something that Roland couldn’t understand. Then he said it again, his voice tight with pain: “Shape up.” A pause, then again, “Shape up ... shape up, soldier....” The voice was delirious, getting louder and then fading to a whisper. “Shape up ... yes, sir ... every bit of it ... yes, sir ... yes, sir ...” Colonel Macklin’s voice began to sound like a child, cringing from a whipping. “Yes, sir ... please ... yes, sir ... yes, sir ...” He ended with a sound
that was half moan, half shuddering sob.

  Roland had been listening carefully. That had not been the voice of a triumphant war hero; it had sounded more like a cringing supplicant, and Roland wondered what lived inside the King’s mind. A king shouldn’t beg, he thought. Not even in his worst nightmares. It was dangerous for a king to show weakness.

  Later—how much later Roland didn’t know—something prodded his knee. He groped in the dark and touched an arm. Macklin had gained consciousness.

  “I owe you,” Colonel Macklin said, and now he sounded like the tough war hero again.

  Roland didn’t reply—but it had dawned on him that he was going to need protection to survive whatever was ahead. His father and mother might be dead—probably were—and their bodies lost forever. He was going to need a shield from the dangers of the future, not only within Earth House but beyond it—that is, he told himself, if they ever saw the outside world again. But he planned on staying close to the King from now on; it might be the only way that he could get out of these dungeons alive.

  And, if anything, he wanted to live to see what remained of the world beyond Earth House. One day at a time, he thought—and if he’d lived through the first day, he could make it through the second and the third. He’d always been a survivor—that was part of being a King’s Knight—and now he’d do whatever it took to keep himself alive.

  The old game’s over, he thought. The new game’s about to begin! And it might be the greatest game of King’s Knight he’d ever experienced, because it was going to be real.

  Roland cradled the holy axe and waited for the one-eyed hunchback to return, and he imagined he heard the sound of dice rattling in a cup of bleached bone.

  16

  “LADY, I SURE AS hell wouldn’t drink that if I was you.” Startled by the voice, Sister Creep looked up from the puddle of black water she’d been crouching over.

  Standing a few yards away was a short, rotund man wearing the tattered, burned rags of a mink coat. Beneath the rags were red silk pajamas; his birdlike legs were bare, but he had a pair of black wingtips on his feet. His round, pale moon of a face was cratered with burns, and all his hair had been scorched away except for his gray sideburns and eyebrows. His face was badly swollen, his large nose and jowls ballooned up as if he were holding his breath and the blue threads of broken blood vessels were showing. In the slits of his eye sockets, his dark brown eyes moved from Sister Creep’s face to the puddle of water and back again. “That shit’s poison,” he said, pronouncing it pizzen. “Kill you right off.”

  Sister Creep stayed crouched over the puddle like a beast protecting a water hole. She’d found shelter from the pouring rain in the hulk of a taxi and had tried to sleep there through the long and miserable night, but her few minutes of rest had been disturbed by hallucinations of the thing with the melting face in the theater. As soon as the black sky had lightened to the color of river mud, she’d left her shelter—trying very hard not to look at the corpse in the front seat—and gone in search of food and water. The rain had slowed to an occasional drizzle of needles, but the air was getting colder; the chill felt like early November, and she was shivering in her drenched rags. The puddle of rainwater beneath her face smelled like ashes and brimstone, but she was so dried out and thirsty that she’d been about to plunge her face in and open her mouth.

  “Busted water main’s shootin’ up a geyser back that way,” the man said, and he motioned toward what Sister Creep thought was north. “Looks like Old Faithful.”

  She leaned back from the contaminated puddle. Thunder growled in the distance like a passing freight train, and there was no way to see the sun through the low, muddy clouds. “You find anything to eat?” she asked him through swollen lips.

  “A couple of onion rolls, in what was a bakery, I guess. Couldn’t keep ’em down, though. My wife says I’m the world’s champion upchucker.” He put a blistered hand on his belly. “Got ulcers and a nervous stomach.”

  Sister Creep stood up. She was about three inches taller than he. “I’m thirsty,” she said. “Will you take me to the water?”

  He looked up at the sky, cocking his head toward the sound of thunder, then stood dumbly regarding the ruins around them. “I’m tryin’ to find a phone or a policeman,” he said. “I been lookin’ all night. Can’t find either one when you need ’em, right?”

  “Something terrible’s happened,” Sister Creep told him. “I don’t think there are any phones or cops anymore.”

  “I gotta find a phone!” the man said urgently. “See, my wife’s gonna wonder what happened to me! I gotta call her and let her know ... I’m ... okay ...” His voice trailed off, and he stared at a pair of legs that protruded stiffly from a pile of twisted iron and concrete slabs. “Oh,” he whispered, and Sister Creep saw his eyes glaze over like fog on window glass. He’s crazy as hell, she thought, and she started walking north, climbing up a high ridge of rubble.

  In a few minutes she heard the fat little man breathing heavily as he caught up with her. “See,” he said, “I’m not from around here. I’m from Detroit. Got a shoe store at Eastland Shopping Center. I’m here for a convention, see? If my wife hears about this on the radio, she’s gonna worry herself sick!”

  Sister Creep grunted in reply. Her mind was on finding water.

  “The name’s Wisco,” he told her. “Arthur Wisco. Artie for short. I gotta find a phone! See, I lost my wallet and my clothes and every damned thing! Me and some of the boys stayed out late the night before it happened. I was upchuckin’ all over the place that mornin’. Missed my first two sales meetings and stayed in bed. I had the covers over my head, and all of a sudden there was a godawful light and a roarin’, and my bed fell right through the floor! Hell, the whole hotel started shakin’ to pieces, and I crashed through a hole in the lobby and ended up in the basement, still in my bed! When I dug myself out of there, the hotel was gone.” He gave a crazy little giggle. “Jesus, the whole block was gone!”

  “A lot of blocks are gone.”

  “Yeah. Well, my feet were cut up pretty bad. How ’bout that? Me, Artie Wisco, with no shoes on my feet! So I had to take a pair of shoes off a ...” He trailed off again. They climbed nearer to the top of the ridge. “Bastards are way too small,” he said. “But my feet are swollen up, too. I tell you, shoes are important! Where would people be without shoes? Now, take those sneakers you got on. They’re cheap, and they ain’t gonna last you very—”

  Sister Creep turned toward him. “Will you shut up?” she demanded, and then she kept climbing.

  He lasted about forty seconds. “My wife said I shouldn’t come on this trip. Said I’d regret spendin’ the money. I’m not a rich man. But I said, hell, it’s once a year! Once a year in the Big Apple ain’t too—”

  “Everything’s gone!” Sister Creep screamed at him. “You crazy fool! Look around!”

  Artie stood motionless, staring at her, and when he opened his mouth again his tight, strained face looked about to rip. “Please,” he whispered. “Please don’t ...”

  The guy’s hanging on by his fingernails, she realized. There was no need to chop his fingers off. She shook her head. The important thing was to keep from falling to pieces. Everything was gone, but she still had a choice: she could either sit down here in the rubble and wait to die, or she could find that water. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t sleep too well last night.”

  His expression slowly began to register life again. “It’s gettin’ cold,” he observed. “Look! I can see my breath.” He exhaled ghostly air. “Here, you need this more than I do.” He started to take his mink coat off. “Listen, if my wife ever finds out I was wearin’ a mink, I’ll never get off the hook!” She waved the coat away when he offered it, but Artie persisted. “Hey, don’t worry! There’re plenty where this one came from.” Finally, just to get them moving once more, Sister Creep let him put the tattered coat on her, and she ran her hand across the scorched mink.

  “My wife says I can be a re
al gentleman when I wanna be,” Artie told her. “Hey, what happened to your neck?”

  Sister Creep touched her throat. “Somebody took something that belonged to me,” she replied, and then she clasped the mink coat around her shoulders to ward off the chill and continued climbing. It was the first time she’d ever worn mink. When she reached the top of the ridge she had the wild urge to shout, “Hey, all you poor, dead sinners! Roll over and take a look at a lady!”

  The decimated city stretched out in all directions. Sister Creep started down the other side of the ridge, with Artie Wisco following close behind. He was still jabbering about Detroit and shoes and finding a phone, but Sister Creep tuned him out. “Show me the water,” she told him when they reached the bottom. He stood looking around for a minute, as if trying to decide where to grab a bus. “This way,” he finally said, and they had to climb again over the rough terrain of broken masonry, smashed cars and twisted metal. So many corpses, in varying degrees of disfigurement, lay underfoot that Sister Creep stopped flinching when she stepped on one.

  At the top, Artie pointed. “There it is.” Down in the valley of wreckage below was a fountain of water spewing up from a fissure in the concrete. In the sky to the east, a network of red lightning streaks shot through the clouds, followed by a dull, reverberating explosion.

  They descended into the valley and walked over piles of what had been civilization’s treasures two days before: burned paintings still in their gilded frames; half-melted television sets and stereos; the mangled remains of sterling silver and gold punchbowls, cups, knives and forks, candelabras, music boxes, and champagne buckets; shards of what had been priceless pottery, antique vases, Art Deco statues, African sculpture and Waterford crystal.

  The lightning flashed again, nearer this time; and the red glow sparked off thousands of bits of jewelry scattered in the wreckage—necklaces and bracelets, rings and pins. She found a sign sticking up from the debris—and she almost laughed, but she feared that if she started she might laugh on until her brains burst. The sign said Fifth Avenue.